Author Archives: Hera Hussain

Despite the sudden need to postpone our events and migrate our work almost entirely online, we don’t want our meaningful engagement with you to end!

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ll be launching a second set of learning circles in collaboration with Hivos’ Open Up Contracting Program in an effort to grow and strengthen our community of practice. These intensive online discussions will focus on key themes for OC implementation, such as impact measurement, change management, advocacy, and using the Open Contracting Data Standard. Unlike a webinar, these will be small learning groups that will be intimate and interactive throughout. Sessions will be held in English and Spanish and recorded and shared with the community at large.

The open contracting journey can be long and complex, but you don’t have to go it alone. There’s a whole community of open contracting implementers around the world and they have a lot to share! To be the first one to hear about these sessions and join the discussion, sign up for the mailing list here.

In this session, we will talk about how to design projects and embed impact monitoring from the get-go. We’ll hear from Viktor Nestulia from the Open Contracting Partnership who will discuss his experience of creating a business intelligence tool, BI ZORRO, in Ukraine.

In this session, we will talk about how to build buy-in with a larger team or organizations into your reform design and plans. In your reform, you will work with many different stakeholders from many different sectors of society. It is important to think about how supportive or opposing they are to your efforts and also how much power or influence they have.

We will cover:

→ Defining your reform goals & outcomes

→ Identifying stakeholders with the power to embed your reform in the wider policy agenda

In this session, we will talk about the different open contracting for healthcare projects that are looking at the pricing of medicines. From benchmarking to licenses and advocacy, this session will cover what strategies have worked and common challenges.

In this session, we will talk about ways to best support projects in “low-tech” environments – in terms of technical infrastructure, data availability, or capacities of key stakeholders. Our guests will share how they have used workshops, data, stories and social media to work towards or with OCDS. It’s not a linear line from paper-based procurement to OCDS.

Last week, BBC Newsnight published a new report on “Britain’s Hidden Children’s Homes” (video here). Using open contracting data provided by Spend Network and Open Contracting Partnership, BBC Newsnight was able to investigate what councils spent to provide accommodation to vulnerable teenagers. Their findings were disturbing. The quality of care fell short of what authorities and their contractors were expected to provide, putting young people at risk.

These were the most worrying details:

A key provider of what’s known as supported accommodation appeared to charge wildly different prices to councils desperate to house vulnerable teenagers over 16 years old for the same service despite arguing it was specialist, tailored care.

Journalists interviewed kids who were reportedly left hungry, cold and unsupervised while in ‘care’.

Under-16s and over-16s in one facility were not in school, even though they were supposed to be.

Children were self-harming and lacked appropriate supervision and basic support, current and former residents of a home told the journalists.

How did this happen? How can it be prevented? In this blog, we’re going to examine how this could have been detected and prevented much earlier.

“I have never felt more un-secure and un-looked after and unsupported ever.” – former child in care

We hear that the contractor shown in this episode was earning up to £76,000 a month combined from multiple councils for housing and supporting six teenagers. The contractor defended his rates, saying they were determined by risk, staff and other overhead costs, and placement outcomes.

Here’s the detailed data of the costs reported by BBC Newsnight, pulled from the little data available in publicly available sources. Working with BBC Newsnight’s team, surprisingly, this was much harder to analyze than I expected.

Walsall Council – £2,000/monthMerton Council – £3,600/monthCumbria Council – £16,000/monthHampshire Council – £18,000/monthA London Council – £22,000/monthBromley Council – £28,000/month

“Local authorities would not agree to pay something that they don’t agree too… No one is holding them at throat level.” – Contractor

From the conversations I’ve had with procurement officers and people familiar with the social care sector, there is very little competition. Authorities are often left with no choice but to go with the price charged by such contractors especially when a child is referred by social services and there is an urgent need to house them. Ofsted, the children’s regulator recommends that young people are not placed in such supported accommodation, which, unlike official children’s homes, is unregulated.

There is no register for prices where councils can compare their rates to other localities, or implementation reports which demonstrate the performance record for companies across the UK. The contractor investigated by Newsnight was reported to have earned £7 million in social care contracts across the UK.

When asked about its contract rates, the care provider said:

“You’re asking me a very interesting question and that much I won’t divulge. It’s commercial sensitive information.”

But is information about a public contract really commercially sensitive? While there are indeed some pieces of information that are, such as intellectual property, our global research across 20 countries has shown that in most instances, commercial confidentiality is a myth and evidence doesn’t support keeping information secret.

On the contrary: information such as tender prices and contract award amounts should public – academic research analyzing 3.5 million procurement records in the European Union found that more transparency reduced single bids, commonly linked to much higher expenses. In fact, publishing five more data points about each contract would add up to 3.6 billion Euros in savings. More generally, our work across 50+ countries also shows that transparency reduces risk, helps detect corruption, increases competition and leads to better public services.

In the UK, transparency regulations require local authorities to publish spending (above £500) and public contracting information (tender and award notices) every month. The UK was an early open contracting innovator and advocate supporting the principles of Open Contracting through the Open Government Partnership, G7, and the cross-government anti-corruption strategy.

However, this has not trickled down to the administration. The UK has been publishing open contracting data on government contracts through the central platform Contracts Finder since 2016. However, there are obvious gaps in the quality of implementation which we’ve written about here. Oftentimes, we find data is missing or published late and there is no accountability for doing so.

This conversation isn’t just about the price, it’s about value for money. ‘Value’ packs in a lot more than just how much councils pay: it’s about making sure the benefits are maximized from what it costs taxpayers. Those benefits, in this instance, would be the quality of care and the wider socio-economic and environmental benefits of such a contract. Some children will need specialist care, and therefore, will cost the contractor more. As the provider interviewed by the BBC himself says, pricing is done on the basis of the level of risk, support costs and children’s particular needs.

What is striking in the BBC investigation was that there seemed to be little or no checks to see whether this figure was proportional to the quality of care. Experts told the BBC higher charges might be reasonable if the children were getting high-end one-to-one support, but the journalists apparently found that this mostly wasn’t the case.

Although Newsnight focussed on one provider, there are likely many others that can’t be checked, because the data is not available. Journalists play a vital role in holding organizations accountable by monitoring the quality of care and detecting fraud, but it shouldn’t be up to them to protect society’s most vulnerable children.

Far from actively supporting this investigation, local authorities did little to help. The BBC Newsnight team approached councils to ask children if they would like to talk to the investigations team about their experience. All councils refused. This story would not have come out if it weren’t for the bravery and fortitude of the two children no longer in care to recount what they experienced, and the persistence of the Newsnight team (and their editors) who kept digging.

Public procurement for social care is complex but it is clear that transparency, better data, smarter policies and engagement can help clean up this sector.

We need a systemic re-imagining of our procurement systems. We’ve written to the Government about this, individually and as part of the wider civil society. Timely and accurate publishing and monitoring of bid prices, award values, contract documents and implementation reports would be a good start.

We do dozens of workshops everywhere and know our partners do even more. Ever been stuck thinking about a way to start an open contracting workshop with a fun and light exercise that gets people out of their seats and doesn’t take forever? We’ve got one for you! Not only is this exercise a great ice-breaker, it makes for an even better energizer in between breaks and after lunch.

How about a round of Open Contracting Charades. That’s Charades but with an open contracting twist. Here’s how a typical charades game is played:

The good thing about this ice creaker is that it’s a purpose-driven activity so it’s easier for the introverts to get involved and is generally less awkward for everyone. It’s also about exploring key open contracting terms so it instantly gets newcomers feel like they already know something. And best of all, the laughs the group gets from the absurd to the comical act outs of the terms gives everyone memories to last for a long time!

And here’s how to play OC Charades.

Step 1: Divide into groups with people they don’t know. There should be no more than 4 people in each group. Tell them about the game and act out a word. You can go with “contract” as it is easy.

Step 2: Stand at different sides of the room and give them one minute to come up with an open contracting-related term. The phrase can be a maximum of three words. If you see people looking unsure, approach them and offer help. Here are some words and phrases to get you started: open contracting, open data, collaboration, tender, data standard, suppliers, feedback loops, citizen monitoring, unique identifiers, point of contact.

Step 3: After the one minute is up, ask the teams to prepare how they will mime it to the other groups. Give them 2 mins for this and all members of the team must participate. You can ask people if you can film them and share them either just on your workshop’s Whatsapp or group email. It’s a fun thing to look at once the event is over.

Step 4: Teams take turns acting out their words and phrases.

This exercise can be done in 10-20 minutes – and hopefully, everyone will feel energized and ready to jump into the next session.

The Open Contracting Partnership alongside FullFact, Institute of Government, Open Knowledge Foundation, 360Giving, Open Data Institute, Nesta, Royal Statistical Society, King’s College London and mySociety are calling on the UK government to take urgent action to overhaul its use of data.

Gavin Hayman, our Executive Director said:

“Governments are already using open contracting data to save themselves billions and deliver much better public services. It’s great to see strategy, now let’s get to work building the infrastructure and putting the data to work for citizens.”

The full open letter is below.

—–

Dear Secretary of State,

Better use of better data is key to better government and a better society.

Although parts of government have worked hard to improve how they collect, analyse, share and use data for the benefit of the public, problems remain. As the National Audit Office said recently:

“Without accurate, timely and proportionate data, government will not be able to get the best use out of public money or take the next step towards more sophisticated approaches to using data that can reap real rewards… [D]espite years of effort and many well-documented failures, government has lacked clear and sustained strategic leadership on data.”

Better use of data across the public, private and third sectors will help people across the country hold government to account, give them confidence that they are using trustworthy services, and allow them to make decisions that improve their local communities. Moreover, it will create new organisations and increase productivity and innovation in existing ones.

We believe that the National Data Strategy, allied with the forthcoming Spending Review, provides an opportunity for the government to set out a long-term ambition for how it will transform the UK’s use of data.

Without major and sustained effort, the UK risks falling behind other countries over the next decade and never being able to catch up.

It is vital that the National Data Strategy addresses the following issues:

Government needs leadership from the very top if it is to get a grip on data in government, the wider economy and society. The Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary and Chief Executive of the civil service must be at the forefront of delivering the National Data Strategy, and need the levers to deliver it and ensure compliance. It must also be a government strategy – too often, at present, different departments have conflicting values and incentives which prevent data being used for the public benefit. Looking beyond central government, it should also empower local government structures in their use of data.

The National Data Strategy must deliver transformative, not incremental change. It will need to be a long-term project, with a vision for at least the next ten years and practical steps for turning that ambition into a reality. This will require engagement across society, across the UK, and, crucially, across party political boundaries.The UK risks falling behind for decades to come if it does not take this opportunity.

Government must stop choosing ignorance by failing to invest in the data that would help it better understand its own operations, the effectiveness of its policies, the quality of public services and key facts about its population and the economy. A National Data Strategy should create an expectation of evidence by default and data-designed government, building into all processes the need to have the right data at the right time to inform the right decisions.

We need to invest in skills to convert the growing amount of data into real information that can be acted upon, and which allows policymakers to understand uncertainty in the data. Resources for data literacy should be made available for other sectors and the wider public.

There must be a mechanism for decision-makers, data users and the public to be involved in the National Data Strategy and on an ongoing basis (including, but not limited to, proper processes for requesting data that doesn’t currently exist).

Government needs to ‘fix the plumbing’ and sort out its data infrastructure, including the use of unique open identifiers to help those inside government and, through safely increased access to shared and open data, so that those outside government can make the most of government data.

Government needs to earn the public’s trust. Debate and discussion about the appropriate extent of using citizens’ data within government needs to be had in public, with the public. Great public benefit can come from more joined-up use of data in government and between government and other sectors. But this will only be possible, sustainable, secure and ethical with appropriate safeguards, transparency, mitigation of risks and public support.

The National Data Strategy must go beyond public services. Government’s role is broader than the delivery of public services; it can help shape how data is used across the whole of society through interventions such as research funding, procurement rules, regulatory activities and legislation. The strategy must recognise this and describe how government will make data work for everyone in the UK.

If you’ve hosted a workshop on open contracting, you are probably familiar with the feeling of having allocated 1 hour to OCDS discussion that ends up taking up half the day. I wanted to understand why this happens.

Partly it is because of the complexity of the procurement landscape and the depth of the data standard but partly it is because of the way we talk about it. I found that for any audience who isn’t a procurement or technology expert, though the stages make sense, the fields and the structure do not. And let’s not even get started on identifiers and JSON (insert who is this JASON dude joke). Who else has had someone come to them after a talk or presentation and ask where they can buy the license for OCDS?

The feeling of your heart sinking into your chest because you just realised no one understands what OCDS is.

There are some words that trip people up: platform, standard, and schema. A map, a template, and a framework might be less accurate but it gets the point across.

One morning, sitting at a hotel lobby eating a rather exciting plate of breakfast buffet (aren’t those the best?), I was dreading the OCDS part of my presentation to a group of traditional (as opposed to data) journalists. For such cases of emergency dread, I keep a batch of yellow post-its inside my diary. I started sketching a skit. What if each JSON bracket was a human, and the different characteristics of that person became the data fields? That’s how it started.

When I ran the exercise, it was a roaring success. It breathes life into the OCDS. Here’s how you can do the same.

What you’ll need:

Physical room

People

Post-it

Marker

A scenario

Pocket-sized OCDS Fields List

Let’s begin.

Scenario: You need to get the help of the room to come up with this. What is being procured? Who is doing the procurement?

SETTING THE SCENE

Get everyone to stand up (if they can) and line along the sides of the room.

Label five areas of the room or a large table with the procurement stages. Use the post-its and write in a large font.

Now you need a scenario. Ask the room to choose a procuring entity. I usually choose one that everyone knows about, such as the Presidency, Health or Education. You want to get through this quick so don’t let anyone get into a discussion. This is about quick decisions.

Then, ask them to pick a common good or service. The simpler, the better though if you have a crowd that knows procurement, you could choose a complex one that requires outsourcing and subcontracting.

Now you tell everyone it will be an open and competitive process (to make things simpler).

Time to determine the stakeholders. Has this been commissioned by the minister? Make up a story. If yes, ask someone to volunteer to be the minister. Now we have a political figurehead. Next, we want to choose the procuring officer. Make the minister and procuring officer stand next to each other in the middle of the room. A good time to introduce the concept of “buyer” and what it could look like in data e.g “Ministry of Education”, “Buyer ID”. We want someone to be data users too so let’s pick some citizens, civil society, aspirant government contractors, and journalists. Make everyone wear a post-it note tag or a name card with their roles on it.

Time check: 10 mins.

PLANNING

Now walk to the side of the room that represents the planning stage. First task: we need to get a planning document. Get someone to be the planning document then discuss with the room what sort of things should be involved in the planning process. Is there market research? What will be procured? For how long? Where will it be advertised? You can give the “planning document ” an A4 sheet. Whenever you hear a field that is in the OCDS, tell the room that and get someone to put that on a different coloured post-it and put it on the planning document representative’s paper. This is also the place to introduce the “Open Contracting Identifier (OCID)” and attach it to another person.

Discuss that the planning document will become the tender document. So now get a volunteer to be the tender document.

You can get the planning document to do a high five or any other form of interaction with the tender document to mark the completion of this stage.

Time check: 5 mins.

TENDER

It’s now time for the tender document to run (people love the running aspect because workshops make everyone’s back ache) to the tender stage.

Get the OCID to run to the tender stage as they now become part of the tender data too.

Get people to shout out what the key things they would want to see in the tender document are. Each time you hear an OCDS field, put it on the post it and repeat the process. This is the stage I start getting people to think about data format (Is this a date? Should this be a number or text?)

This is the time where you want to call on the participants representing private sector to start naming their companies and submit bids. A good time to share the importance of bid information especially with the lens of the stakeholders (including the minister). Get the companies to go to the tender document and submit their bids (post-its will do).

Time check: 7 mins.

AWARD

Get the “buyer” to choose a successful contractor. Now this needs to be announced.

Get the OCID to run to the award stage as they now become part of the award data too.

Ask the chosen contractor to walk to the award stage. This is where you can introduce the “supplier” cluster within the OCDS. This relates to the many fields that come under supplier such as name, unique ID, contact details and addresses.

Ask the room to shout out what information they would want to know about the “supplier” and when you hear a OCDS field, get them to write it down on a post-it. This is the best time to discuss company identifiers and where they could be sourced. Ask them how they can tell this company (e.g “Apple Services Ltd”) is not the same as “Apple Inc”. Someone might mention addresses would be a good way and then you can discuss why they are not! This is a really important stage as it is often the only information made public by authorities that don’t do open contracting, so each OCDS field should be assigned to a participant. Make them walk to the supplier. Now discuss data types and format. People will often suggest “name” or address is a good identifier. This is also the place to talk about directors and beneficial owners, and what information you would want to know about them. You want to talk about the date of birth, address, nationality and why these details would be important in investigations or due diligence. Beneficial owners are natural persons who own, control and benefit significantly from a legal entity such as a business. See OpenOwnership for more resources.

If your crowd is full of seasoned professionals, you could bring this activity up a notch by asking them to identify other databases this information could come from e.g. company, beneficial ownership and tax registers.

Time check: 10 mins.

CONTRACT

Now walk to the contract stage and take the “buyer” and “supplier” with you. This is a trickier stage because most countries don’t publish contract documents. This is a good time to talk about what information is and should be captured here, such as product specifications, milestones, dates and reporting requirements.

Get the OCID to run to the contract stage as they now become part of the contract data too.

Discuss contract amendments and how they should be disclosed.

Time check: 5 mins.

IMPLEMENTATION

The contract has been implemented. Ask different stakeholders one by one what they want to know about the completed process and then discuss what should be public and what doesn’t have to be.

Get the OCID to run to the implementation stage as they now become part of the implementation data too.

Time check: 7 mins.

Congratulations! You’ve now introduced the OCDS in an interactive and fun activity that they will most-likely never forget. The stages and fields have come alive.

After this, it’s good to get people to talk about how and where they would know if there is a problem. Or what data is currently collected and published by their procurement authority. You can even start a conversation around what are the most important data points from what they have seen!

If you run this exercise at your next workshop or training, don’t forget to let us know how it goes.

Governments spend one-fifth of their budgets buying goods and services from the private sector, but women-owned businessessupply only 1% of this market.

Although we are talking about the world’s largest marketplace – accounting for 15% of the world’s GDP – that’s one women-owned business in a room of 100 suppliers. This just isn’t good enough.

The challenges faced by women in the workplace or business are well documented, but discussions around women’s role in the public procurement market focus on women’s access to public goods and services. We also need to talk about women’s participation in public procurement as planners and suppliers. Even small changes can have a big impact on the market, creating shifts in market behaviour, stimulating economic activity, and progressing gender equality.

Gender bias and rigid power dynamics can recreate discrimination and oppression in how government money is planned, procured, implemented and monitored.

Fortunately, there are many ways to take make procurement more equitable from involving women leaders and constituents in the planning of extractive projects that displace them, to monitoring access to maternal healthcare, and boosting the presence of women-owned SMEs. Gender-responsive contracting is relatively new, so monitoring reforms and sharing lessons is key.

We are going to launch a series of blogs on these topics in the coming weeks. In this blog, we will focus on access to the procurement marketplace.

Women-owned companies get only 4.7% of federal contracts in the US and 10% of Canadian SME suppliers are women-owned. In Albania, 26.8% of all businesses are run by women but only a tiny 5% of municipal contracts are awarded to women-run businesses adding up to just 3.2% of total procurement spend.

Governments that have committed to open contracting and are implementing procurement transparency policies should provide a ripe environment for comparing barriers, gender-responsive policies, and procurement data.

From research and stories on the ground, we know that talk of gender equality falls short of a transformational impact unless it takes into account the different factors which may render policies less effective for further marginalised groups, such as women of colour and/or with disabilities.

By using an intersectional analysis, to plan public policy and procurement budgets, governments can catalyse gender equality and women’s participation in the economy. An intersectional analysis acknowledges that systematic oppression can impact individuals who fall under more than one marginalised group differently than those who only fall under one. For instance, minority women-owned businesses might have more barriers to entry to public procurement than others in the City of Philadelphia. This is why our projects there are putting this issue on its agenda.

Here are some reasons why a better representation of women in the public procurement market is good for society:

Contracts may perform better, as was found in Albania. Women-owned businesses fared better and provided larger savings to the government. One UN report cites an example from the private sector, AT&T, attributing $4 billion of increased revenue credit to more women suppliers in the supply chain.

Advancing sustainable development and inclusive growth: Women entrepreneurs have been found to reinvest up to 90% of their income for the benefit of their families and communities, which generates inclusive economic growth and helps meet governments’ development objectives. The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report of 2015 shows that there is a positive correlation between gender equality and a country’s GDP per capita. McKinsey estimates that a gender-equal labour market could add as much as $12 trillion, or 26% to the global annual GDP by 2025. When women are under-represented in the marketplace, the whole economy suffers.

Encouraging entrepreneurship: Women entrepreneurs will come face to face with additional barriers (in comparison to their male entrepreneurs) because of social, economic, cultural, and legal inequities. Businesses owned by women tend to be micro or SMEs, which make them even more sensitive to economic shock. Public procurement is a way of narrowing the gender gap and boosting their future prospects.

Sparking innovation: There is a growing body of evidence to show that when products or services are designed by men for women, the result is often not fit for purpose and can even turn deadly, such as the design of crash-test dummies, anti-stab vests, medicine and artificial heart implants. Low levels of women participation in the public sector can deprive economies of new ideas, creativity and economic growth.

And it’s the right thing to do.Businesses owned and run by the gender spectrum deserve an equal opportunity to participate and benefit from public procurement, both as suppliers and users.

We’ve come up with four areas of recommendations based on our expertise and we would like to hear the views of our community on this too.

Monitor gender-disaggregated procurement data

Governments should collect, publish and monitor gender-disaggregated data on procurement to spot gender gaps and barriers to women’s participation in public procurement. By applying the Open Contracting Global Principles and Data Standard, open data can be used to develop mechanisms to monitor competition and gaps, quality of implementation, and understanding and addressing complaints of structural discrimination.

Increase women-owned suppliers winning government contracts

The business environment in the marketplace can be improved by tackling discrimination and supporting measures to create fairer markets for women entrepreneurs, and encouraging inclusive procurement within government and in the private sector.

Lack of access to information on bids, understanding often complex procedures and bias can create barriers for women entrepreneurs. Taking a gendered approach in the creation of feedback loops with women suppliers, planners and users will reduce many of these barriers. By proactively seeking out and engaging women-owned business groups, establishing a fair complaint and redress procedure and simplifying contracts to reduce preparation time for tenders, authorities can open opportunities for women-owned suppliers.

In some countries such as the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United States, designating a portion of all contracts to women-owned businesses is gaining popularity. In the United States, 5% of federal contracts are planned to go to eligible women-owned small businesses especially to boost women’s presence in male-dominated fields. In 2013, a survey of women contractors found that 61% find the program useful, including 28% who found it very or extremely useful.

Plan for gender-responsive procurement

We know that doing more business with women-owned businesses makes economic sense but an integrated gender-responsive procurement strategy will ensure that the goods and services procured also take into account how they impact women, often the poorest and most vulnerable group in society. Procurement teams should also be analysing how their procurement decisions impact gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Public procurement is the government’s number one corruption risk. And corruption has a strong gender element. Recognising the gendered aspects to corruption from sextortion to modern slavery in the supply chain and creating measures to both prevent and prosecute.

Gender cannot be a stand-alone agenda. It has to be mainstreamed. This is why there is no one gender project within our portfolio. Many of our projects have that threaded into them, especially those in Colombia, Nepal, PhiladelphiaandLA.

It is clear that governments need to use their massive purchasing power to support women in business. And a gender-inclusive open contracting approach throughout the procurement cycle can help shift power dynamics in favour of gender equality and inclusive growth. We’re excited to see many of our partners such as Hivos, EITI, PWYP, NRGI, Open Government Partnership and ILDAincorporating a gender lens in their work and we look forward to collaborating with them.

This International Women’s Day, we invite our community to join us in investing in a gender-smart approach to public procurement.

In many ways, this was the year of Argentina. It hosted Youth Olympics and the International Open Data Conference amongst many other international events. But perhaps the one that stands out the most is the G20, a first for South America. Alongside our partners around the world, the Open Contracting Partnership called for the opening up of government contracts and procurement, as a competitive, fair, innovative and corruption-free public procurement market powered by open data. This will be essential for fair and sustainable development – the theme for G20 this year.

Though the Leaders declaration addresses both anti-corruption and infrastructure, it falls short of making an ambitious resolution to fulfil existing commitments. Alas, the same can be said about the 2019-22 Anti-Corruption Working Group Action Plan. It recognizes that ‘more needs to be done’ and that the G20 apparatus should explore ways of assessing implementation. But it doesn’t set out a timeline or trackable commitments to tackle corruption, a critical oversight.

Excerpt from the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group Action Plan 2019-22.

One in every three dollars is spent by governments on public procurement on the roads on which we take our children to school. Public procurement is a government’s number one corruption risk. So the stakes are high when procurement goes wrong. Buildings fall. Drugs become prohibitively expensive. Qualified businesses playing by the rules miss out on opportunities. This is particularly acute in the within the infrastructure sector given the complex, multifaceted and multi-year (often public-private partnership) projects.

It is encouraging to see the action plan focus on infrastructure, and that it re-affirms the importance of integrity in public procurement. That said, anything less would have been unforgivable given massive recent scandals like Odebrecht.

The promise to consider gender in corruption is progressive; we think that it is vital and that it is a scandal that only 1% of public contracts worldwide go to women-owned businesses. This can be fixed (see our policy recommendations here). The action plan also mentions that the impact and utility of “new technologies”. There a hat tip to that generic “promoting the use of open data” yet these words are not tied to any concrete action, initiative or data standard. They also fall short of recognising the transformational opportunity to reconfigure procurement as a digitised service given that it makes up a third of all the money spent by government. In the past few years, Argentina has taken strides to open up government data and commit to pro-transparency, anti-corruption policies so we feel this was a missed opportunity.Progress would have been a powerful signal of the country’s own reforms and of its renewed global leadership. Now the G20 moves to Japan. Though there is a quick turnaround, infrastructure continues to be a hot topic and the value of open contracting to the government, business and citizens is as relevant as ever.

Transparency in infrastructure is key to the success of these investments. Adoption of the Open Contracting and CoST guidance will give investors access to comprehensive, standardised and systematised asset-level data including long-term project performance indicators which enable informed decisions. This also increases understanding and allows to identify solutions early on for risks related to large-scale infrastructure development including environmental impacts, human rights violations, land settlement issues. We thus encourage the G20 Japan presidency to: (i) disclose better, timely data of contracts and projects for infrastructure in open and re-useable formats, such as the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) and its infrastructure extension aligned with the CoST Infrastructure Data Standard (IDS); and (ii) explicitly include this good practice into the infrastructure guidelines currently under development, in full alignment with the pillars already prioritised by the G20.

It’s time for the G20 to deliver infrastructure governance that works for all.

2017 was a big year for open contracting.We brought over 200 people from our community from across 37 countries together at the first OCGlobal for a movement-wide ‘check-in’, expanded our team, added more programmes and took a deeper look at how we organise ourselves for more impact. This allowed us to celebrate progress so far but also regroup with our wider community on our next step forward.

The themes that came about during conversations we had with our partners throughout those big changes got us thinking about who is in our community, and how we can better support them. As an organization committed to learning, we conducted our annual network analysis. We want to put ourselves out of business so we need to foster deep connections between different groups within our community. So are we growing our existing networks growing, strengthening and are we helping bring new groups into the fold?

We measured the following indicators:

network growth: measured as the number of new users with at least two links to existing actors, compared with the network at a previous time

network strength: measured as average network connections between members, over time this will tell us if individuals in our network are becoming more connected.

new communities: measured as ‘as a cluster of at least 25 people who share a common interest’. These were identified by using our core email network and analysing their conversations and networks on twitter (as a proxy for wider discourse).

Here’s what we found:

The number of actors in our top 10 communities has grown by almost 9 times! We went from 771 actors in 2016 to a whopping 7,160 in 2017. We’ve characterised the main communities as open data, open government, anti-corruption, media & journalists, other transparency actors, technology solutions & vendors, resource governance, funders, business and learning. On a stricter comparison, email network alone grew by 310% (from a list of 1723 to a list of 5336 in 2017). 65% of this email network was also present in 2016 which means we’re retaining our core communities.

Our network is highly interconnected, with an average of 10.7 connections per actor. This was 9.7 in 2016. This is a good sign, suggesting as new members join, they are also plugging into a tighter more connected network.

We added 13 new communities. This includes engaging media and journalists, tech & vendors organisations, the private sector, open data and civic tech, anti-corruption organisations, civil society groups and impact and learning organisations in a more meaningful way. We set ourselves a relatively arbitrary target of engaging with 5 new communities to force us to bring new actors into the fold. We have exceeded that.

Play with the full network here: http://djotjog.com/s/gexf-web2/?file=data/ocp_network.gexf

This is great news all around. To shift power from closed to open, opaque to transparent and to embed our work in long-term strategic and political change – we have successfully connected with more people in diverse communities in more meaningful ways. These results also surface a challenge we are eager to face: how to maintain our mission of building the field, not being the field, with so many players in the game, many of whom are new for us.

If you are deputy mayor of Nepal, a procurement agency in Paraguay or a journalist in the UK, you will need support in different ways. This analysis is just the first step in learning how we can best support these actors, not the last.

By coupling this with our global field survey, and event feedback – we’ve been able to tailor our field-building efforts (see results here or summarised below) last year to gave our communities a big boost. The global field survey revealed that we needed to play a more active role in building connections between groups and convening the field more often. As a result, we leveraged #OCGlobal17 and emphasised on involving more actors (and coalitions) in our country work too. That increase in engagement is now evident.

The analysis also shed some light on challenges for our team and the whole field.

Engaging Communities

Our field survey and #OCGlobal17 told us that we need to do more to engage businesses and journalists more for example.

On business, we’ve only seen a small uptick – our community rose from 50 to only 67, so we have started incorporating more business engagement into all our country work, especially in Nigeria, Colombia and UK. Though we continue working with fantastic partners such as The B Team and IACCM to engage with global businesses, we’re investing in a new role that ensures this approach is reflected in all our programmatic strands (apply here by 17 Aug!).

When we started measuring the growth of our field, the media and journalist community we engaged with was so small that it wasn’t even a category we tracked. It was clear we needed to do a lot more in 2017 and so we did. As you can see below, now almost 12% (1,666 people) of our field is filled with media organisations and journalists who care about the opening of contract information. In 2017, more than 250 stories about open contracting were published in 26 countries and international outlets and a number of journalists joined us at #OCGlobal17. And this year, we’ve trained journalists at the BBC in UK and others in Nigeria, hosted a data dive in the UK, data investigation in Colombia. There’s a lot more to come!

Following the many commitments of 2016, we had a big task ahead of us. Following up with 40 governments, and turning those words into projects and implementation became our mission in 2017. You can see this clearly in the numbers. Following the many commitments of 2016, we had a big task ahead of us. Following up with 40 governments, and turning those words into projects and implementation became our mission in 2017. You can see this clearly in the numbers.

In one year, we grew our community in open data and open government by 27 times (3054%), and anti-corruption and resource governance by 6.2 times (520%).

Mapping also shows that our advocacy with the US government and partners has decreased. This is a direct result of a shift in focus or political landscape there. That said, we’ve just recently launched a programme on encouraging US cities to adopt open contracting principles and data standard with the Sunlight Foundation.

Keeping an eye on twitter

Twitter activity inevitably comes in bursts peaking at large events and announcements. We noticed a drop in our influence from 2016 to 2017, which is a shame but perhaps understandable when you think we have the major events of the Anti-Corruption Summit and the OGP Summit in Paris. Our Twitter community is still growing or our own activity is up but over the last year, we’ve had less major Summit announcements etc (and, to be fair, there is a wall of bad news out there that may also be distracting our key allies).

That said, we are after shifting a global norm in policy and practice so we want the idea of open contracting to be omnipresent so we dug more deeply into it to tell us what’s happening and we should do about it. One of the insights is that we have a series of super-connected influencers on twitter who we need to reach out to and engage more. They are the iris of Sauron’s Eye in the diagram below. When we look at the most influential advocates on Twitter, there are many names that would not be regarded as such in traditional terms. Among our top 10 influencers, there were no celebrities or politicians.

Eyes of Sauron: Core 300 twitter members of Open Contracting’s community surrounded by the entire network

We pulled a complete history of our email records and the last 6 months of our Twitter content and all of the people who @mentioned opencontracting on Twitter, or who we @mentioned. Though “following” is a common metric, we chose “@mentioning” as it is a far better measure of direct influence. This yielded a total of 23,277 names (see the ‘Eye of Sauron’ chart below). The core 300+ followers can be seen at the center of the Eye. However, to make sense of the active core, we only analyzed people in the network who had @mentioned at least two other people in the network, just a few thousand names. To see how this analysis was done, you can read Marc’s blog here.

This is the third year we have commissioned a network analysis. We shifted gears to focus on identifying the most important metrics that are both reliable and useful for changing our strategy, and how the measurement of those can be operationalised. We’ve written code scripts and built web apps to allow systematic measurement, reducing the time required to run this analysis again. So expect more regular updates from now on. A couple of quick notes for the network nerds out there.

1. Defining communities is still an art and not a science. It is still relatively arbitrary. We used a community of about 25 people with tighter connections between them and us than to other parts of the network. In 2016, we were defining them by events (IODC, OGP) but have altered this for 2017 as it is was not useful.

2. Core email growth. Creating granular assessment for this indicator such as the number of staff, programmatic objectives and quality of interactions would provide the context needed to make this metric more robust. We sent 170,380 emails sent in 2017, 139% more than in 2016 and the number of people OCP staff emailed grew by 310%. These are striking numbers but context is key. The total number of emails sent is the easiest to compute, but could be seen as a vanity metric.

3. Twitter has a short memory span. If you’re undertaking Twitter analysis, the timing and frequency of data collection can completely change the analysis. Twitter has a rather short memory span, so most users’ histories can only be retrieved for about the last 3,000 tweets. This makes year-over-year comparisons difficult and impractical in practice. We found 6-month intervals to be more feasible and our analysis represents this. Some users will not be benchmarkable over time (looking backwards), either because they have no history, or they tweet too often and their history doesn’t go back far enough.

4. Don’t forget the context. It may seem puzzling that Open Contracting’s influence decreased on twitter even though the community had grown. This makes complete sense though when you consider that in 2016 our advocacy efforts were much bigger due to summits. In future, we will look at #opencontracting and see if the conversations on there are different to those that involve @opencontracting mentions.

5. Humans are irreplaceable (sorry AI!). Although we have been able to operationalise email and Twitter engagement analysis through building web applications, a human eye is needed to create an in-depth insightful report. Only OCP staff were able to categorise relationships (especially when a person belongs in two groups) into the community groups that matter to OCP’s theory of change (i.e. open government, open data, anti-corruption, etc). A context-based analysis was key to this study and that cannot be stressed enough.

Network analysis is a new and developing field. Better theories of measuring impact, engagement and the interaction between networks are emerging. Though there are a few tools out to do this analysis, most are expensive and few are open-source. This is why we’ve invested in creating tools that will power such work quicker, and more efficiently for us. From redefining how we categorise communities to detangling threads of connection between groups, we’ve come a long way in our understanding of both the importance and limitation of such analysis. We hope that this long read provides some food for thought for others in our movement or wanting to analyse their networks too. You should take pride in the fact that over the past year, you helped the open contracting community grow by 9 times. We shot above our targets and with a richer understanding of our network and tactics to build the field, we’ll do our best to do the same next year.

As background, the UK committed to being the first G7 member to implement the Open Contracting Data Standard as part of its commitments to fighting corruption and boosting local economic impact at the UK Anti-corruption Summit, in their Open Government Partnership National Action Plan (2016), and in the cross-government anti-corruption strategy (2017).

Though the UK’s political commitment was broad and ambitious, the Government took a targeted approach by applying it to Contracts Finder, a repository of UK tenders and contracts that is run by Crown Commercial Service (CCS). The project upgraded Contracts Finder data to machine-readable open data, aligned to Open Contracting Data Standard. Thought the benefit of this approach has been the improvement of a popular data feed, it has meant the UK has lost out on systemic procurement reforms in the awarding and monitoring of contracts.

The Crown Commercial Service recently published its first Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning report on its open contracting project. In it, there is good news and bad news, and valuable lessons for other OCDS implementers.

The good news!

It is fair to say that the UK has made progress in improving the availability and usefulness of public procurement information.

When we started working with UK in 2016, there was limited data on Contracts Finder and few, if any, checks on data quality and the information available was far from a complete picture of government procurement. In the past year,112,619 notices have been published, the number of registered suppliers has increased by 52% with a majority being SMEs, and 275 new government buyers have started publishing on the platform. A new compliance strategy was implemented in June 2017 that includes monthly checks by the Crown Commercial Service Transparency in Procurement and quarterly reports on whether the data is being updated regularly in accordance with the regulations.

One of the most pressing issues affecting the usability of the dataset was the inability to publish identifiers such as company and charity numbers. In November 2017, this feature was added which resulted in a surge of identifiers. This was especially useful for the two data-thons organised by 360 Giving and OCP. You can read write-ups from the events here and here.

Crown Commercial Service also recognized the importance of multi-stakeholder and cross-governmental engagement in the project. They established a UK Open Contracting Steering group, comprised of UK government officials, civil society and data users, established to support delivery of the project.

In pursuit of their goal of SME participation, the UK team also began enabling key suppliers to advertise and report on sub-contractors in their supply chain. This makes the UK one of the first Open Contracting Data Standard implementers to a trial publication of subcontracting information. First data points from this feature should start rolling in from later this summer.

The team has also been exploring uses of the data to promote improved value for money. To this end, CaSIE, an internal tool for the Government which will provide powerful visualisations of key commercial data (including spending and contracts) has been developed by CCS. The objective is to help government buyers better manage supplier relationships.

The remaining challenges

Before proposing where the UK could do better, it’s important to highlight that Contracts Finder is not an e-procurement system but a reporting system. Each government department and local council use different systems to procure and publish tenders and contracts. They are required to report this information to multiple outlets (including the EU, Contracts Finder, local websites) according to various criteria set out in regulations. One of the unfortunate challenges that have not been addressed is that they don’t have to send the information to Contract Finder if they post it elsewhere. This leads to the unfortunate circumstance where the UK has the overhead, but not the functionality and added insight of a complete contracts register.

This shortcoming was very evident when Carillion imploded. There was a desperate scramble to assess the damage and Contracts Finder was not very helpful (covering less than 10% of the contracts by our estimation).

Technical change management is never easy in government, especially in countries like the UK where existing systems and organisational culture can create inertia to digital transformation. The work done by CCS in to break through some of these challenges is commendable.

Contracts Finder was established to advertise public sector procurements to SMEs and provide greater accountability to the taxpayer by providing transparency of contract opportunities and awards across the public sector. Accomplishing these goals will require significant further work.

Here are some of the areas in need of further work:

Timeliness and completeness of reporting: While the MEL report shows some important improvements, there are still some major gaps in the timeliness and completeness of the planning, tender and award data published through Contracts Finder. For example, award notices are often published very late (up to a year after the fact) and many tender and award notices are missing from the platform altogether. Gaps of this size can significantly reduce the usefulness of this information, especially for businesses who are deciding whether to apply for bids or not. Departments need to do better in reporting the required information. This challenge is not unique to the UK as it involves both changing human behaviour as well as changing IT systems to facilitate timely and complete reporting. We are learning lessons about what kinds of carrots and sticks are helpful to this end such as highlighting good performers and chastising poor performers among their peers, making data entry more user-friendly and automated, validation and quality checks. We recommend to the UK to utilize all of these approaches to make timeliness and completeness of data published by the central government department a priority, assigning a department to oversee compliance.

Completing the picture with bidding and post-award data: Presently, Contracts Finder is only enabling information on planning notices, tender notices and award notices. Certain key pieces of information for fulfilling the UK’s policy objectives are missing. For example, the identity and number of bidders in a procurement process is not published. To understand the procurement market and protect its integrity, this is critical information. In addition, contract documents themselves are rarely published. Without disclosure of contracts, citizens are left in the dark on deals that can affect their communities for decades. For example, in Gloucestershire, the local community has mounted a legal challenge to gain access to an incinerator contract and its amendments on the grounds that it may be both poor value for money and harmful to the environment. Despite access to information grounds for publishing the contract, the local council has fought disclosure. Reinforcing guidance, requirement and processes for the publication of draft and signed contract documents (except in prescribed circumstances of national security, public harm etc) would enable accountability. Finally, there is enormous value in publishing implementation data (such as payments and completion of milestones.) Late payment of contractors is a major issue in many parts of the world that leads to decreased participation of SMEs in procurement markets and decreased value for money (as prices go up and timelines extend). Linking and publishing this data can help ensure policy objectives of SME participation and government integrity and accountability.

Lack of unique identifiers: In theory, if spend and procurement datasets (which are published separately) are compared, they should match. For each item of contract spending, there must be a corresponding contract. In practice, this is currently impossible to do in the UK. For both government spending and contract datasets, the lack of unique open identifiers for companies and buyers has been a consistent challenge. The UK Government has recognised this and has made some technical provisions to address this, which is encouraging. That said, the Government also announced a ‘data suppression law’ this year to help company directors, secretaries, people with significant control and LLP members remove home addresses from publicly available company documents. Addresses have long been used by civil society to investigate corruption and identify corporate networks, especially where unique identifiers are not available.

New indicators: We believe the UK can boost its public procurement reform strategy by tracking the number of indicators that are not possible right now. These have been suggested to the Crown Commercial Services.

Data collection, publication & quality

Data use & stakeholder engagement

Impact indicators

1 Percent of contracts that have data across all five phases of contracting process for completeness of data

2 Total percent of procurement budget that is represented in Contracts Finder portal for completeness of data

3 Total percent of contracts that are submitted to Contracts Finder within x days of award (this “x” amount to be specified by local stakeholders) for timeliness

1 Number of unique bidders in Contracts Finder for Portal use

2 Number of unique SME bidders in Contracts Finder for Portal use/SMEs

3 Percent change of unique bidders in Contracts Finder over x time (this “x” period to be specified by local stakeholders), for Portal use

4 Percent change of unique SME bidders in Contracts Finder over x time (this “x” period to be specified by local stakeholders) for Portal use/SMEs

5 Percent of survey respondents who report they would recommend Contracts Finder for Portal quality

6 Percent of survey respondents who report they can find all the information they need on Contracts Finder for Portal quality

1 Mean number of tenders per supplier for Market Competitiveness

2 Average number of bidders per tender for Market Competitiveness

3 Percent of total awarded value awarded to recurring contractors for Market Competitiveness

4 Total percent savings (difference between budget and contract value) for VfM

The Open Government Partnership National Action Plan is the perfect opportunity for the UK to take on some of these recommendations and encourage the use of this data set by the government, civil society and business as well to help foster a culture of data in UK public procurement that is currently absent. Time is also ripe for the UK Government to encourage local councils and boroughs to use open contracting data to make cities smarter and fairer. We hope the moving of Crown Commercial Services to the Cabinet Office will improve coordination of this agenda across central and local government.

One more positive to end: the UK has been an active champion of open contracting globally through the Contracting 5, Open Government Partnership, Open Data Charter, the Anti-Corruption Summit, DFID and the Prosperity Fund. We are happy that the UK has prioritised public procurement transparency and hope it continues to push for quality and compliance. Lack of good quality information can damage trust in public procurement markets, deterring honest businesses from participating which can affect the diversity of suppliers, innovation and can make existing anti-corruption regime less effective. We look forward to seeing even more progress in the future.

The demise of Carillion, and concerns over the health of Capita, two of the largest government contractors in the UK, make one thing clear: we just don’t know enough about who wins government contracts in the country.

Despite the UK’s commitment to transparency and efforts to publish contracting and spend data, data quality and completeness remain a problem. For example, only about 10 of Carillion’s 400 or more UK contracts have been reported on the main government database, Contracts Finder. After an expose by the Times revealed that 92 out of the 202 “transparency” publications that ministers had pledged to release were either late or missing. Theresa May wrote to departments at the end of last year to remind them of their obligations to publish better data and information.

Having real-time, public and standardised open data for all of the Government’s public procurement can help increase understanding of who buys what from whom, manage risk, spot dysfunctional markets, better advertise business opportunities, and monitor and flag questionable awards. That’s why we organised a data hack in London last month with more than 30 developers, data analysts, journalists and policy experts to look at the existing open data sets around the UK’s public procurement.

The two days revealed a lot about how the data and policies could be improved to help improve access and use of contracting information in the UK across government, business and civil society.

Why we need higher-quality data in the Open Contracting Data Standard

Overhauling the entire UK public procurement system is much overdue. Multiple systems are being used across local and central government for awarding contracts, tracking spending and managing performance. None of these systems talk to one another.

One of the values of using standardised open data is to connect across these silos. In fact, we were able to create one database to incorporate open data on government contracts, spend data, grants, company information and beneficial ownership, in collaboration with Crown Commercial Services, Spend Network, 360 Giving, OpenCorporates, and OpenOwnership, but it wasn’t easy.

Here are some the key challenges.

1) While the UK Government is following the Open Contracting Data Standard when publishing new contracting data in Contracts Funder, data entry can be poor and incomplete.

2) Another critical gap is unique identifiers. The lack of open, unique identifiers throughout spend and contract data makes it difficult and time-consuming to match them against Companies House data, for example. It should be mandatory for government buyers to publish unique open identifiers for suppliers. It’s not rocket science. Ukraine has done it.

3) Procurement is a complex area, and a data dictionary would be hugely helpful to explain the meaning of different terms mentioned in contracts and spending information as well as to navigate common errors found in the data set.

All three issues are solvable, though some require more resources than others. Creating standard spend categories and requiring councils and Government departments to use them is perfectly possible, as is better quality control. Not taking action blocks meaningful progress and impact on growth, innovation and anti-corruption and means when you have a disaster like Carillion, you have to scramble to catch up.

Spending patterns across different councils, government departments

For the full picture of where local government put its priorities, you need to follow the money and look at the spending patterns. Our hack shows that variation was surprisingly high.

The spending data shows that the East Midlands region had the least diverse spending pattern with £23 million going to repaying debt since 2010 and whereas South West had the most. Yorkshire and Humber spend far more on Facilities Management than North East or North West (see graph below).

Our hack team used the Government’s spend dataset, and run statistical analysis on the spend amounts, market share and ‘experimental categories’ provided by Spend Network’s platform. Since the Government spend dataset is not categorised, Spend Network’s algorithm uses keywords mentioned in each transaction as well as combining information about the buyer (e.g. we know ‘KPMG’ is a financial services provider) to assign a category to that transaction. While this is an efficient way of categorising millions of rows of spending data, it has a significant margin of error. Councils and Government departments should propose official spend categories to avoid skewed analysis.

Some transactions stood out, and there was no way to find out more about them by looking at the provided data set. £971 million was paid out to “Coventry Building Society Charitable Foundation” by Derbyshire County Council over five years. A Google search revealed that the charity runs community projects across the West Midlands. The amount seems too high for community projects, so maybe it was a data entry error; should it have been Coventry Building Society rather than Coventry Building Society Charitable Foundation. Spend Network, and the hack team submitted an FOI request to get more clarity from the council.

Need to link contracts to its beneficial owners

There’s still a lot of work to do to understand better who benefits from public contracts. A critical component is the link to the beneficial owners of the private companies winning the deals.

When the 600 companies mentioned in Paradise Papers were matched against government contracts using Contracts Finder, four matches were found including Capita and Halcrow. There could be more if the subsidiaries of the Paradise Papers businesses were also run through the list of government contractors. This isn’t straightforward because spend data uses group company names such as ‘Halcrow’ rather than the exact subsidiary they are engaging with such as ‘Halcrow Holdings Limited’. The next step was to find the beneficial owners (or the real beneficiaries) behind those companies. They are both PLC’s so they are exempt from reporting beneficial owners but our team looked at the spread of the corporate networks through OpenOwnership.

Upon further digging, our team found that there was a 10-fold increase in the number of transactions between the Government and Halcrow during a short period going up from 16 to 160. Surprisingly (and without any explanation), we also found large amounts of negative payments in July 2016 recorded. According to AppGov, a civic tech project that provides a user-friendly view on government spending, a £37,3 million negative payment was made to the Department of Transport for something related to the M25, possibly the Hyder Halcrow M25 Joint Venture. We submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Department of Transport to clarify the negative transaction. There could be a simple explanation!

An in-depth look at housing construction

One of the areas that our hack team was interested in particularly was housing. We found that when you compare a list of housing construction contractors and elected officials (councillors and politicians), many names were flagged. This dataset should be an essential part of due diligence checks by Government buyers for conflicts of interest. This Guardian investigation shows, for example, that nearly 100 London councillors have links to the property industry.

According to Contracts Finder, 700 companies won construction contracts for housing since 2017. The team tried initially to use spend data to do this analysis but found too many records were ‘redacted’ so they switched to contract award notices from Contracts Finder. Since Contracts Finder data does not have many identifiers, the company names were matched to Companies House records (via OpenCorporates) for directors and beneficial owners, revealing 695 distinct organisations and 2000 directors/beneficial owners.

Interestingly when mapping the addresses of beneficial owners and directors of housing construction contractors who have won contracts valued at £1-100 million, these are spread nicely over the whole of UK except Northern Ireland where there are none. When those who won contracts over £500 million were mapped, it clustered around the South East of England.

For such analysis to work, the two single most important data points are director and beneficial owner home addresses and company information. Both data sets are under threat. As chance would have it, as we started the last day of the event, the Government announced ‘data suppression laws’ to help company directors, secretaries, people with significant control and LLP members remove home address from publicly available company documents. At the hackathon, we used OpenCorporates API to access these records as they match Companies House data against company registers from around the world. However, not even OpenCorporates is sure how this new law applies to the existing data they have and whether they will be able to keep historical information.

The other data point is identifiers – the golden chain that allows you to identify individual organisations and to connect different datasets. Though Contracts Finder has added the field for inputting company and charity numbers, not all procurement systems (since each council and central department has a different one) have reflected it and compliance is low. When companies are mentioned, there are hardly any identifiers. This is bad news for transparency.

Turning insights into action

If the interest in our hack is anything to judge by, then businesses, civil society, and citizens are just as interested in this data as law enforcement and journalists. The insights from this data hack show the long road ahead for transforming the UK’s public procurement landscape to allow easily accessible, usable, targeted information.

The historic vote in the UK Parliament forcing Overseas Territories to publish public registers of who owns companies shows that political progress is possible. Until better identifiers and data quality checks are put in place across public procurement more generally, government and wider society are missing out on the benefits of having good quality open contracting data. The UK’s forthcoming Open Government Partnership National Action Plan would be an ideal place to commit to further improvements in accessibility, quality, and usability of both contracting and beneficial ownership data. It’s time we get better deals from better-qualified businesses.

We’re excited that people who came to the hack want to continue working on these projects so we’ll organise follow up events in the coming months. And we will be working with the civil society Open Government Working Group to push for ambitious commitments on open contracting (and better beneficial ownership information) in the UK’s new Open Government Action Plan due in July. Sign up for our slack if you want to stay in the loop!